For QLFC S6R5
Prompt: Use the title of a story written by your Chaser 2 for inspiration. I chose thisisfaycountri's Healing Hands.
Optional prompts: (idiom) every cloud has a silver lining, (object) broomstick, (word) eternity
"Ms. Pomfrey. Ms. Pomfrey!"
Poppy snapped out of her daydreams and jolted upright. Across from her, Professor Vinay sighed and buried her face in her hands, back slouched in defeat.
Poppy blinked. Oh right. She was at her career counselling meeting.
"Sorry, what was that?"
Professor Vinay rubbed her temples. "I asked what career you would like to pursue in the future."
Poppy leaned back in her chair. Easy. "Quidditch," she declared.
There was a moment's pause. "Anything else?" her professor asked. "No backup plan?"
"No, that's it."
Professor Vinay took off her glasses and set it down onto her desk. "May I be frank with you for a moment, Ms. Pomfrey?" Without even waiting for a response, she continued on. "You are currently on the reserve team for Slytherin. The chances of you being selected or scouted for a professional Quidditch team are very low."
Poppy felt her cheeks burn as she slunk further into her chair. As if she didn't already know that!
"You are not unintelligent, Ms. Pomfrey, even if your grades say otherwise. All I am asking is for you to put some more effort into your schoolwork and consider where you want them to take you in the future. You're in fourth year now. You may feel like you have a lot of time, but your final year will creep on you faster than you expect. Have I made myself clear?"
"Yes, Professor," Poppy mumbled. A pause. "Am I free to leave now?"
Professor Vinay made a shooing motion with her fingers. "Off you go now."
Poppy escaped out of that office as quickly as she could and started down the hallway. She wasn't the type or person who was particularly bothered by things like the future, and so by the time she reached Charms class, she had almost forgotten about the matter entirely.
She had plenty of time.
…
She did not have plenty of time. Poppy bit her lip and stared down at the letter her parents had sent her after receiving her interim grades, which were littered with D's and A's.
She was in sixth year now. Her grades were still abysmal. She still hadn't played a single game as a reserve player on the Slytherin team, and to top it off, her hair was frizzing up from all the humidity in the air!
But her chance came unexpectedly out of the blue. One of the chasers in Slytherin had suddenly come down with a fever after jumping into the Great Lake the other day and was completely unable to play in the upcoming game. Poppy, as the first reserve, was first in line to play next.
She gripped her broomstick and took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart. She would be ok. She would be great. She would… she would… she would try not to throw up into the bushes over there.
Their captain shouted, "Let's go!" and Poppy mounted her broomstick and took to the sky, only a beat behind the rest of the team. She took her place in mid-field opposite the Hufflepuff team and watched the referee with baited breath.
The whistle blew.
…
Poppy woke up to a pounding headache. She attempted to open her eyes, only for pinpricks of pain to stab her eyes. Not only that, but the entire right-side of her body felt like it was on fire.
"Wha—" she groaned. "What's going on? Where am I?"
"Oh, thank Merlin," came a familiar voice. "You're awake!"
"Emma?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm here," her friend said. Poppy felt her hand gently brush the hair away from her forehead. Poppy sighed a little at the cool relief.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Well, it was the Slytherin-Hufflepuff match, do you remember that?"
Poppy squinted her eyes open, Emma's dusty brown hair and impeccably ironed clothing coming into view. She glared incredulously at her. "Come now, I haven't completely lost my marbles yet! Of course I know it was the Slytherin-Hufflepuff match. What happened to the game?"
Emma rolled her eyes. "Anndd, you're back. Well, you were doing very well for the first half of the game. But in the second half you and Orion Black were both going for the ball and you collided."
A faint memory of the collision started to form in her head. Poppy buried her face in her hands and immediately regretted it when she experienced a bout of dizziness. "And then I fell," she said, despairingly.
"And then you fell," Emma agreed. "It happened so quickly that no one really knew what happened until some of the professors on the sidelines rushed you to the infirmary. I came right away, of course."
"Who won?" she asked.
Emma winced. "Hufflepuff."
"I can never show my face outside these doors again," Poppy groaned. Not only did she do an awful job of being a reserve, they also didn't manage to win the game in the end. She felt like crying.
Emma sighed. "It's not the end of the world," she said gently. "Every cloud has a silver lining. You just have to find yours."
...
Poppy was currently skipping Transfiguration class.
Well, she wasn't skipping per se. She was technically still an invalid, she tried to justify to herself. A concussion was a very serious injury and she was just ensuring that she was fully recovered before she went back to class again.
Oh, who was she kidding. She didn't want to face the other students again after the embarrassing spectacle of falling off her broom. The unfortunate reality of attending a boarding school was that everyone knew everyone, so by now, every single student would have heard about it already.
And so she laid spread eagle on the infirmary bed instead, falling into and out of sleep. Her little corner of the room was sectioned off by a divider so she had complete privacy.
She heard voices getting louder as people, she assumed, approached the infirmary.
Then the curtain was suddenly drawn back and Poppy yelped as she looked up into the face of Madam Moran, the matron of Hogwarts.
"Uh," Poppy was all she managed to say before her arm was grabbed and she was pulled out of bed. She had just gotten her bearings when a large jug was deposited into her arms.
"If you're going to sit around in here, you might as well make yourself useful," she said sternly. "We've got five injured students here from a potions accident gone wrong."
Without any other instructions, Poppy had no choice but to follow the matron carrying the heavy jug of… some sort of liquid.
"What is it?" she asked.
Madam Moran didn't even look back at her as she said, "General wound cleaning potion. Honestly, what are they teaching in class these days?" A small tsk. "All five students suffered from small to large lacerations. I'm going to remove the shards from their skin and you'll clean it with this rag dipped in the potion."
The two of them then rushed around the five occupied beds. The procedure went exactly as the matron described. Madam Moran would carefully pry out the shards of cauldron out of the students and deposit it into a bucket nearby. Poppy would then clean out the wound as meticulously as she could.
"Ferula," Madam Moran would mutter, and bandages would spring up from the table across the room and bandage the student up.
After all five patients had been taken care of and all the supplies put safely back in place, Poppy looked expectantly at Madam Moran.
The matron stared blankly back. "What is it now?" she asked.
"Am I not going to get a 'thank you' or anything?" Poppy asked.
Madam Moran scoffed. "A 'thank you', she says! Not when you were taking up space and skipping class. You can consider that payment enough for both of those. Now go to class."
Madam Moran turned her back and pulled her hair back into a tight bun. Poppy's mood plummeted. She nastily hoped that the matron would go bald before she turned forty. Without another word, Poppy turned her nose up and walked out of the room.
A quick tempus showed that it was dinner time, so she headed straight for the dining hall and slid into place next to Emma on the far side of the table.
"Oh, hello," was all Emma got into before Poppy launched into a tirade on everything that had happened just prior. She aggressively spooned food onto her plate as she did so, nearly knocking over her goblet with her hand motions.
At the end of her rant, Emma pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. "Yes, how dare she make you use the skills you learned in class and then kick you out of the infirmary when you weren't sick," she said drily.
Poppy was still fuming. "I don't appreciate the sarcasm."
"Hey, don't rip my throat out. I'm just saying that she has a point."
Poppy held onto her anger for two more minutes before she deflated. "I guess so. I just thought I did a good job, is all."
"Hey, I didn't say you didn't do a good job," Emma grinned. "But tell you what, why don't we go to Hogsmeade this weekend? Take your mind off all this Quidditch and infirmary stuff."
Poppy cheered. "Let's go!"
Later at night though, Poppy laid in bed thinking, her mind going into overdrive. She hadn't appreciated Madam Moran's sharp tongue and caustic personality, but she couldn't deny that for the first time in her life, she felt like she was doing something good.
…
The pub was bustling as it always was on weekends. Poppy shoved her way through the crowd with practiced ease and created space for herself in a corner of the room. Emma appeared a couple minutes later with two mugs of butterbeer.
"Okay, spill," she said.
Poppy raised an eyebrow. "Spill what? The butterbeer?"
Emma groaned. "No, you know what I mean. You've been off all week. Don't think I didn't notice it."
Poppy smiled sheepishly. "Would you believe me if I said I'm still hung up by the Quidditch match?"
"Nope," Emma said. "Seriously, what's going on."
Poppy scraped absently at the wooden table with her nail, wondering how she could possibly word it so Emma would understand the rollercoaster of feelings she'd been having lately."I've just been thinking about my time in the infirmary, that's all. I actually… kind of enjoyed healing?" she said uncertainly. "I've never felt like that before about anything else I've done, excluding maybe potions. But I don't know what to do now that I've discovered it."
"Well, why don't you be a healer then?" Emma asked, squinting into her mug to see if she had any traces of butterbeer left. Poppy stared at her.
"A healer?" she repeated.
"Yeah, like a healer or a medic. You're good at, what, potions, herbology, and charms right? That's basically what you need to be a good healer anyways, so you're basically set." Emma stared curiously at her. "Are you interested?"
Poppy pondered the question. She had only ever been interested in being a Quidditch player, but… "Maybe," she said. "But I don't want to be at St. Mungo's or anything. You know how I feel about crowds."
Emma's brow furrowed. "Well, what about Hogwarts?"
"What?" Poppy said, confused.
"You could become the matron of Hogwarts," Emma suggested.
Poppy squinted at her. "What do you mean? Madam Moran is the matron."
Emma waved a finger in her face. "Exactly! Why don't you go apprentice under her? Then you'll be primed for the position after she retires."
As the realization that that might be a viable option for her sunk in, Poppy squealed in excitement. "That's perfect! Why didn't I think of that before?"
Emma leaned back in her chair and grinned smugly. "I'm your better half, that's why. Now buy me another drink."
"Just one? I'll buy you two, no—three more!"
With that decided, Poppy let all her worries fall from her shoulders and just let herself drink the night away.
...
Poppy sucked in a deep breath. She pushed open the door to the infirmary, stepping in to find that Madam Moran was thankfully unoccupied. The matron raised an eyebrow at the sight of her.
"What is it, Pomfrey?" she asked, short and succinct as always.
"Please take me on as your apprentice!" Poppy said, beaming.
"No," Madame Moran said.
Poppy's face fell. "What? But—
Madam Moran gave her a stern look. "But what? Don't think I don't know how awful your grades are. A healer needs to be good at many things, Ms. Pomfrey, and you are good at none of them."
Poppy clenched her teeth together and felt tears sting her eyes. "But what if I am good at them? You'll never know if you don't give me a chance."
The matron sighed. After a long silence, she said, "Hand me a sheet of parchment with all E's and then we'll talk."
…
Ah, summer.
Normally Poppy would be spending the time making house visits to other pureblood family houses and attending house parties, or she would be shopping in Diagon Alley and eating ice cream at Florence's.
Instead, she was holed up in her family's library surrounded by a giant stack of books and fifty sheets of parchment paper, studying.
Her parents had been stunned at the change and eyed each other over the dinner table when they thought she wasn't looking. She had previously espoused on the dangers of studying too much, to which her parents had rolled their eyes and ignored. But Poppy didn't have time to explain her change of heart. Any time and energy she had she needed to dedicate to studying.
It wasn't that she was stupid. It was just as Professor Vinay had said all those years ago. Poppy picked up on things quickly, but she was a carefree person by nature and so she had never had a reason to apply herself in class.
Now, she did though.
But she had a lot of material to catch up on. The things they studied in class built on each other, so Poppy had to go back to the basics and pull her dusty third year textbooks out from under her bed.
For certain subjects, she was fine. Potions in particular had always been her strong suit, so it didn't take much for her to catch up. Her worst subjects though, took a lot more effort.
Poppy bit her lip and tried to transfigure a dinner plate into a mushroom. Her best attempt had the plate giving off a mushroom-like smell, but the overall look of the plate remained unchanged. Poppy threw up her arms and flopped onto her bed.
"I give up," she moaned. "I'm never going to be able to get that apprenticeship and I'll be a bum and die under a bridge."
Emma, reading nearby, patted her back soothingly. "Why don't you take a break? We can play a round of Quidditch outside."
Poppy stared at the corner of her room, where her broomstick was leaning against the wall. Come play with me, it seemed to be calling.
No. Poppy set her shoulders and shook her head. She had found something she really wanted to do for once in her life, and she wasn't about to let anything else distract her from that.
Poppy eyed the stacks of textbooks she had left to go through. Only two years worth of learning left to go.
Oh boy. What had she gotten herself into?
...
Nine months later, Poppy found herself staring at the door to the infirmary, her mind taking her back to last year when she had done the exact same thing. In a month she'd be graduating and leaving Hogwarts forever. This was it. There was no Quidditch team waiting for her after this and no job offers. It was this or nothing.
Madam Moran's face was unreadable as she stared down at the piece of parchment Poppy had handed her.
All E's… except for Transfiguration. Stupid Transfiguration.
It felt like an eternity later when the matron neatly folded the paper into fourths and tossed it onto a nearby table. She turned her back without a word.
Poppy hunched her shoulders in shame.
"Well?" the matron harrumphed. "I've got towels that need folding. Get to it if you want to have dinner on time."
Poppy's heart thumped once in her chest and she beamed. "Yes, ma'am!"